IF
by NativeMoon
Summary: AU! He’d never really believed that there would be one who could have the strength to not betray him… So far he’d been proven right but there is always an exception to the accepted rule, isn’t there?


**Based on characterisations and stories by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and the Wachowski Brothers. A mixture of the move and comic Vs and. In the comic V is assumed to not have been scarred; in this story he will have scars but not to the degree in the film. This is my first ever story with this fandom. Fingers crossed…**

**_Summary:_ _AU! He'd never really believed that there would be one who could have the strength to not betray him… So far he'd been proven right; but there is always an exception to the accepted rule, isn't there?_**

**_IF_ by NativeMoon**

**Chapter 001: Downfall**

F is for Fool; and he most certainly was nobody's fool.

His enemies thought him deranged and a host of other rather unpleasant invectives that were spoon-fed to the masses – but one thing was for certain: he was no fool. She must have thought he was, just like those before her.

_Evey…_

Like God, the man known simply as "V" had never been one to believe in coincidence. But the arrival of Evey Hammond in his life was fraught with unusually ironic coincidences – if one must call them that. Meeting her had been nothing less than the Hand of God moving determinedly though his life yet again. He had saved Evey from a band of rogue Fingermen and then days later she saved his life by enabling his own escape from London's finest. She'd compromised herself, doing what she instinctively believed what the right thing in saving him, and he tapped into his humanity and saved her yet again from Party Leader Creedy's Black Bags. If he'd done as common sense dictated and left her to the Fingermen in Jordan Tower, she would have been black bagged, tortured and killed because of their tenuous association.

How he had laughed when he heard of the exploits Evey Hammond was supposed to have committed in support of him. She was not capable of sedition, treason or murder in the first degree. The young lady who was more child than woman and who only really wanted to go back to her life of conformity and invisibility.

When she realised what her rash acts of impulsiveness had cost her, how she _railed_ against him. He did not like being so unappreciated after everything he'd done for her, but he had to give credit where it was due – Evey's reaction in that moment when she realised that he meant to keep her as a reluctant hostage in his home for a year, lest she compromise his work, was at least an honest one.

It was the only genuine interaction of their time together, he believed.

Evey had awoken the next morning deeply apologetic about her behaviour. They chatted over breakfast and she revealed how she had longed to be an actress in her youth. An alarm should have sounded then, but it did not. Several weeks later she volunteered to aid him in his quest. How sweet and light she had been; this girl-woman who was more angel than avenger. One could say it was a miracle; but the freedom-fighter called V (or terrorist depending on whom you believe) was not a man who set great store in miracles.

_Evey_: passive, conforming, helpless (and hopeless, to a degree) _Evey_ wanted to help. He saw it as the first of her tests under fire. And she failed, miserably so. She was so utterly predictable in her actions that it almost pained him to have her believe that she could ever truly be useful to him and the cause which she never truly believed in. Of course she wouldn't have been willing to service the Bishop as his plan had dictated. She believed that she'd convinced him that she would go through with it, but V knew that the moment she was inside Lambeth Palace and in the presence of the Bishop she would give away the ruse and try to flee.

_And that she did._

V let her believe that she was truy free, knowing full well what fate was to befall her and the gentleman who had given her refuge. Ironically enough, Evey was to have met up with Gordon Dietrich on the night of her and V's acquaintance, but she'd departed past curfew, stupid girl, and been caught by the Fingermen.

_Stupid girl indeed._

She had the temerity to enquire as to why V refused to take advantage of the situation sexually, and decided he was most likely homosexual given his rampant disinterest in her. There was little to be gained from giving her the only answer he could have – why form even the most insignificant of attachments only to suffer betrayal at her hands?

So there she was, hidden away with Dietrich, the government-approved television star and funnyman who most definitely would not want her. And his rejection of her advances would be precisely because _he_ was gay. Like many of a young lady gainfully employed by her former employer, the British Television Network, Evey had only ever been useful to him as yet another smokescreen by which he could suppress even the most seemingly depraved of his proclivities as so defined by their esteemed government.

And Gordon had proved to be quite the useful ally over the past couple of years. Evey didn't know half of what she'd no doubt believed she did. Knowing Gordon as he did, V was quite certain that he had not told Evey everything before Creedy's Fingermen turned up and black-bagged the top-rated funnyman after what was to be his final broadcast – which Chancellor Suttler, the head of the government, deemed seditious upon its airing. Gordon had always believed he would get nothing less than a slap or two on his wrists in the forms of a public apology and community service via the odd fundraiser or a few.

_V had always known otherwise. _

He was ready that night; the night when Evey Hammond herself was black-bagged. Heavily disguised, he slipped in amongst the raiding police and grabbed Evey before one of Creedy's men could. For several weeks he subjected her to what would turn out to be her final, gruelling test. She was arrested, interrogated and tortured endlessly. There were only two options; but again he had to give credit where it was due – it took a bit longer to break her than he'd thought.

She did as expected at first. She didn't know anything about the terrorist called "V" she'd said. She didn't know where he could be found. A clever man would have known simply by the colour of the stone of his home (which he called the Shadow Gallery) where the one place was that he could be found in the whole of London. Poor Evey – her few brain cells deserted her just when they were needed most. The lack of an invigorating intellect still would not have saved her – it would have simply accelerated the inevitable conclusion of her _Annus Horribilis_.

But she performed, oh how she performed to perfection. Even in her final hours Evey was determined to convince herself and her interrogators that she knew absolutely nothing and had not played a roll in recent events orchestrated by Codename: V. When the judgement and sentence to death by firing squad were thusly rendered, she found her voice.

_And still it did not save her._

The moment the confession escaped her rosebud of a mouth and she willingly signed every declaration put before her, Evey Hammond was doomed.

She was doomed not because she had done the things of which she was accused; she did simply because she betrayed V.

The test was his, conducted by he alone in a mock set-up of Larkhill Detention Center adjacent to the Shadow Gallery. V had that much power and resources at his disposal. It never occurred to Evey that what was happening to her wasn't real. A lot of things never occurred to Evey, and so that too was part of her downfall – and that of those who had come before her.

Such was the beauty of V's cunning, demented as it was. However; dementia, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And V was anything but the deranged beast that Suttler and his Fingermen made him out to be.

_Or was he?_

V had shown Evey no mercy, truth be told. He would not even let the not-so-small matter of having fallen in love with her get in the way of his cause, a very just one in his mind. Had she not failed; had Evey Hammond not betrayed him when it mattered most, her fate and V's future would have assuredly been very different.

And so would that of a certain young lady.


End file.
